Live From Sundance: A GQ&A with Peter Jackson and the Makers of West of Memphis

In 2004, Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson and his wife, Fran Walsh, caught the documentary Paradise Lost on HBO, and—like so many others, including Eddie Vedder, Natalie Maines, and Henry Rollins—became obsessed with the case of the West Memphis Three. The story goes like this: In 1994, teenagers Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley Jr. were tried and convicted in the murder of three 8-year-old boys in West Memphis, Arkansas. It was a witch hunt, really, complete with accusations that the crime was Satanic. The prosecution’s case relied on a false confession and testimony, which, in the years since the trial, has largely been recanted. Still, for 18 years, the West Memphis Three remained in prison.

Frustrated by the injustice, Jackson and Walsh quietly began donating money to the cause. They were closely in touch with Echols’s wife, Lorri Davis, and traded e-mails with her late into the night. In time, new evidence would be uncovered, including DNA tests that should have exonerated the West Memphis Three. Instead, the judge refused a new trial. Hoping to win in the court of public opinion, the New Zealand-based directors enlisted Amy Berg, an Oscar nominee for her doc Deliver Us From Evil, to shoot a documentary about the case—a film which they funded.

West of Memphis premiered at the Sundance Film Festival this week, and it’s a triumph: an often chilling story that artfully condenses 15 years of legal back-and-forth into a 2-hour-ish documentary that plays like the best Law & Order episode, and ends with some serious finger pointing. Damien Echols, his wife Lorri, and the filmmakers speak with GQ.com from Park City.

GQ: The film offers up some critical new information, with interviews pointing the finger at Terry Hobbs, the step-father of one of the murdered young boys. Three friends of Terry’s nephew, Michael Hobbs, Jr., took a Polygraph test and, under penalty of perjury, said that Michael told them his uncle had confessed to the crime, and that this had become the "Hobbs Family Secret." Two of those friends were interviewed for West of Memphis, very recently as I understand it. When did you actually finish editing the film?

Amy Berg: A call came in on the tip line on December 11th—Damien’s birthday—and we just started following up. We were filming a week ago. We spoke to two of Michael’s friends on film.

Peter Jackson: We were never in this case to make a film. Fran and I have been involved with the investigations over the last seven or eight years. Amy was shooting her movie concurrently with the investigations. It’s organic and ongoing. You go down a path and it’s a dead end. Another one is successful. It’s just a process. There’s no schedule. There’s no end date.

Fran Walsh: And no budget.

GQ: Is there an Excel spreadsheet somewhere with a tally of what you spent on the investigation?

Fran Walsh: No. We have an accountant who’s been running the books.

Peter Jackson: Someone knows. But we don’t really care. Once you go down a road you take it through to the end.

GQ: On August 19, 20011, the West Memphis Three were released. It was an unusual deal called an Alford Plea, which allowed them to plead guilty while maintaining their innocence. Basically, it prevents them from suing the State for a shit load of money. But what happens now? With this new evidence, will the case be reopened?

Damien Echols: The point of the movie is to get people angry enough and concerned enough that there’s enough of an outcry. If the public doesn’t take up the outcry, the State of Arkansas will do nothing but cover this up.

GQ: Really? Even in the face of this new evidence?

Damien Echols: Absolutely. The prosecutor, Scott Ellington, said one of their main concerns was that if they open this case back up, they’d have to pay us $60 million. That’s one of the reasons I took the Alford Plea. If they’re looking at the choice between either paying us $60 million dollars or paying someone in prison to kill me for $50, I know which one they’re going to take.

GQ: Damien, how rough was it on the inside? Did you really fear for your life?

Damien Echols: The average person could never conceive of how that place is. When I first got to the prison, the guards decided to give me a Welcome to the neighborhood party. They took me to the part of the prison they called "the hole" for 18 straight days. They beat the fuck out of me and starved me. I pissed blood for days.

GQ: What has his wife, Pam Hobbs—the mother of one of the victims—said in the last few days? I mean, she lived with a guy who many now believe killed her son and his two friends in 1993.

Amy Berg: I think it’s something that’s so hard to imagine, that somebody that you brought into your house actually could have done this. I always check in to see how she’s feeling about her situation. I think she’s starting to unravel over it. She said to me, "In the past year, I can’t stop listening to this voice. I think he did it. I really think he did it."

Damien Echols: We had dinner last night with Pam and Mark Byers. She was real quiet. I said, "Are you OK?" And she said, "Yeah, I’m just trying to take in something that I don’t want to take in."

GQ: At one point, Damien, you were convinced that Mark Byers—the stepfather of one of the other victims—was the killer. You accused him pretty strongly in Paradise Lost 2, part of the HBO documentaries made on this case.

Damien Echols: The attorneys I had at the time told me, "This is the guy who did it."

GQ: Joe Berlinger, the director who made the Paradise Lost series, is here at Sundance. Have you seen him?

Damien Echols: Not yet.

GQ: He made three films on the case with HBO, and there was some competition for exclusivity with subjects—like Pam Hobbs—between the two productions. Would a run-in be awkward?

Peter Jackson: Our movie isn’t trying to be Paradise Lost. Ours is showing the internal workings of this small group of people—Lorrie, Fran, myself, and the legal team who were trying to get a result in this case.

Damien Echols: Not only that, but when Amy started making this movie, we hadn’t heard from Joe in 10 years or something like that. He was completely out of our lives.

GQ: Did that upset you?

Damien Echols: I didn’t think about it. And whenever we tried to present new evidence to the judge, they refused to hear it. Peter was saying, "What else can we do?"

Lorri Davis: At that point, the media had turned in Arkansas and we started to get more of the story out—more than we were getting in the courts. So we thought, Let’s just go for it.

GQ: Lorri, you met and married Damien while he was on death row. What did your family think?

Lorri Davis: You know, I waited four years to tell them—until I was really established in what I was doing. My parents had always seen me as the good student, the good daughter. They were shocked. It took them about a year to come on board. But they saw Damien in prison and they were so supportive.

GQ: A Hollywood narrative feature based on this story seems inevitable. Would you be open to that?

Damien Echols: It would have to be something that was incredibly truthful and honest, and had some integrity to it. We’re not interested in doing some horror movie or B-movie.

GQ: Damien, what has life been like outside of the prison walls? This may sound silly, but you were in prison for 18 years—during which time cells phones and the Internet changed interactions.

Damien Echols: In a lot of ways it’s extremely frustrating and confusing. When I’m trying to figure out how to make a computer work and I can’t get it, and I see a 5-year-old on TV doing it.

GQ: Peter, what was it like for you to see Damien outside of the prison walls? And to watch him adjust to life?

Peter Jackson: Partly, I enjoyed it! It was like watching somebody who had been on another planet suddenly arriving on Earth in the year 2011. Lorrie and Damien came down to visit us and work on the movie in New Zealand for two months. We thought we’d do the right thing and introduce him to some amazing food. We took him to sushi places. He’d never tried sushi before. We took him to an incredible restaurant for Wagyu beef. But the one thing he went crazy for was a Big Mac. To be in the room when he tried his first Big Mac—it was like, Keep your arms and legs away from his mouth.

GQ: Damien, what do you do now? Do you find a job?

Damien Echols: I have a book coming out in September. I’m probably going to be doing an art show at the MOMA before then. That’s what I’m interested in exploring right now—writing, visual art, whatever it is. I’m just making life more magical.

GQ: Speaking of movies: Peter, I have to ask, Do you think Andy Serkis—who played Gollum in Lord of the Rings—should be nominated for an Oscar this year for Planet of the Apes?

Peter Jackson: Absolutely, he deserves it. When you look back on the performances of this year, Caesar was one of the outstanding characters that sticks with you.

GQ: How do you convince voters that motion-capture acting is worthy of awards attention?

Peter Jackson: If people could see what the process is that he goes through, they would understand that it’s acting the same as anything else. He’s on set with James Franco and the other performers and his performance is being translated into the action. There’s this lack of understanding. I think if people truly understood and could witness the process, they would get it straight away. I think it’s just that belief, somehow, that special effects are driving it, which is not the case.

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